The Wes Anderson character Quentin Tarantino doesn’t like
When it comes to Quentin Tarantino’s most profound cinematic loves, the list is just about as long as one could imagine. The legendary director has arguably the widest breadth of knowledge when it comes to cinema, and he has gone on record to state his favourite directors many times over the years, as well as a few of his least favourites.
Top of the pile for Tarantino has to be the father of the spaghetti western, Sergio Leone and films such as the Dollars Trilogy starring Clint Eastwood undoubtedly influenced Tarantino when he made Django Unchained, as had the western classics of Howard Hawks, including Rio Bravo.
Tarantino’s violent action sequences take great inspiration from Brian De Palma, director of Carrie and Scarface, while he takes his tension from the delicacy of French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville. When it comes to Tarantino’s martial arts movies like Kill Bill, we know that he’s in great admiration of the iconic Hong Kong action director John Woo.
When it comes to everyone’s favourite pastel-colour director, Wes Anderson, though, it appears that Tarantino has mixed opinions somewhat. He once expressed his dissatisfaction with Anderson’s 1998 comedy Rushmore, starring Jason Schwartzman in his film debut.
In an interview with Bret Easton Ellis, the iconic director said, “I never thought Rushmore was as funny as everybody else did because I didn’t like Max.” Max is the eccentric character that Schwartzman plated, but clearly, he was not quite to Tarantino’s taste.
Rushmore tells of teenager Max Fischer, who takes part in every extra-curricular activity he possibly can when he attends the Rushmore Academy in Houston on a scholarship. However, Max is also on the verge of expulsion and feels alienated by his wealthy peers, but his life changes when he meets a wealthy industrialist named Herman Blume, played by regular Anderson favourite Bill Murray.
It looks as though Tarantino never intentionally wanted to dislike Anderson, but just that he hadn’t really found the film that would make him appreciate his work as so many others had. In 2015, he admitted to “loving” Anderson’s widely-admired The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Tarantino told The New York Times: “The Grand Budapest Hotel is not really my thing, but I kind of loved it. The fact that I wasn’t a die-hard fan before made me even more happy that I could finally embrace him.” So, like with a lot of directors, Tarantino just needed a little bit of time to find the Anderson movie for him.
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